There’s nothing I like better than people engaging in a discussion about ideas – and indeed criticising mine – but if there are two messages I’d really like to get out there, for general use, it’s these:

In case you’re wondering what developments can possibly have taken place to negate the simple charge of them fabricating data (and more) let me jog your memory:

Kiren Ali from Clarion Communications had emailed me months previously, when I was “interested” in helping them, and made it perfectly clear that they were going to rig the results of the survey. If you have a better interpretation of his email from June 5th 2007, which I reproduce in full below for the record because I do not like people playing silly buggers, then do let me know.

“We haven’t conducted the survey yet but we know what results we want to achieve. We want Beyonce to come out on top followed by other celebrities with curvy legs such as J-Lo and Kylie and celebrities like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse to be at the bottom e.g – skinny and pale unshapely legs are not as sexy. I will find out when we will have the results of the survey for you. Are you pretty free this month to work on it?”

Kiren Ali, Clarion Communications, June 5th 2007

As you will remember, there was no team of Cambridge Mathematicians, there was just a chap called Prof Weber, perhaps slightly naive for getting involved, but he bitterly regrets having anything to do with them: he too says that they rigged their data. In fact I reproduced his email in full, and he said a lot more than that:

“The Clarion press release was not approved by me and is factually incorrect and misleading in suggesting there has been any serious attempt to do serious mathematics here. No “team of Cambridge mathematicians” has been involved. Clarion asked me to help by analysing survey data from 800 men in which they were asked to rank 10 celebrities for “sexiness of walk”. And Jessica Alba did not come top. She came 7th.”

Professor Richard Weber, August 31st 2007

I fail to see how pwnership can possibly be disputed in this case. Here is the coverage that appeared in PR Week after the story.

As soon as I saw this I got straight onto Clarion to find out what I was missing, and PR Week were kind of enough to properly engage with the issue, taking an open letter from me to the PR industry, which I have to say was a very impressive move for a trade journal. For anal completeness, and the pleasure of a text version as well as a pretty image, this is what I sent them:

We have to talk. Every week there is another faked survey, another bogus “equation” story, all planted to sell a product. Last week it was “scientists have found the equation for the sexiest walk”, but that wasn’t really an isolated incident: there was the most miserable day of the year (Sky travel), and the happiest day of the year (Walls ice cream), the perfect minibreak (where the formula was so hamfistedly concocted that if you stayed at home with a travel time of zero you had an infinitely good weekend), the archives at badscience.net are overflowing with examples. And let’s not forget the Evolution Report on the future of the human species (Bravo TV) which carried the headline, in the Sun, “All men will have big willies”.

This would all be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that your work is the dominant theme in science reporting. We have to accept, as you know, that the media is run by flaky humanities graduates, who wear their ignorance of science like a badge of honour on their sleeves. Secretly, perhaps, deep down, they regret denying themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for two centuries, but in the meantime, one thing is clear from your phenomenal success at getting these stories into the papers: editors actually believe that what you send them is science news.

You run culture, and you distort ideas and perceptions for a living. What you’re engaged in here is effectively a war on the public understanding of science. These equations tell us nothing, they sell only the idea that scientists are irrelevant boffins who make stuff up. In my world, making stuff up is wrong. I’m not expecting you to stop, but you may absolve yourself of guilt by emailing me more anonymous examples of fakery.

.

And here is what I sent to Clarion, to the people I was speaking to, and to senior management. Luckily I can type very fast, because if I spent more than ten minutes thinking about these jokers, I think my brain would go cold. Sadly they’ve not written back yet.

Hi Jemma,

we were chatting last week about the Clarion Communications campaign on Veet involving scientific research showing that Jessica Alba had the sexiest wiggle. I understand from reading PR Week that there is some concern from Clarion that I may have misrepresented the emails from Kiren Ali, or the status of the data?

Clarion Communications are quoted as saying: “The comments were based on preliminary discussions from a number of months ago and do not take into account the development of the story.” I am very keen to clear this up and ensure nothing has gone astray. Please can you let me know what developments have taken place which in any way affects the core problems raised by the emails from Kiren and Prof Weber?

Just so that we know we are all talking about the same quotes:

Kiren Ali’s email said:

” We haven’t conducted the survey yet but we know what results we want to achieve. We want Beyonce to come out on top followed by other celebrities with curvy legs such as J-Lo and Kylie and celebrities like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse to be at the bottom e.g – skinny and pale unshapely legs are not as sexy. I will find out when we will have the results of the survey for you. Are you pretty free this month to work on it?” I am happy to forward you the full correspondence.

My interpretation is that this is a clear intent to rig the results. Please can you let me know what this email means, if not that, and how it could be affected by subsequent “developments” in the story?

Prof Weber said:

“The Clarion press release was not approved by me and is factually incorrect and misleading in suggesting there has been any serious attempt to do serious mathematics here. No “team of Cambridge mathematicians” has been involved. Clarion asked me to help by analysing survey data from 800 [not 1,000] men in which they were asked to rank 10 celebrities for “sexiness of walk”. And Jessica Alba did not come top. She came 7th. [my italics]”

If there is anything wrong in this email I would be very keen to hear from you, again: as you can see he also seems to demonstrate quite clearly that the results from the “research” were rigged, and states clearly that no “team of Cambridge mathematicians” was involved. As I understood it from our extensive email correspondence he is extremely concerned about the way he has been used in this story. However, please can you let me know as soon as possible if what he says in his email is incorrect?

I am genuinely very keen that nobody is misrepresented here and hope to hear from you as soon as possible. Can you let me know that you’ve received this email and if there is someone else I should be talking to?

Many thanks,

Ben

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If you like what I do, and you want me to do more, you can: buy my books Bad Science and Bad Pharma, give them to your friends, put them on your reading list, employ me to do a talk, or tweet this article to your friends. Thanks!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jut said,

jamess said,

“We have to accept, as you know, that the media is run by flaky humanities graduates, who wear their ignorance of science like a badge of honour on their sleeves. Secretly, perhaps, deep down, they regret denying themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for two centuries”

Am I wrong? Anyway:

“the most significant developments in the history of western thought for two centuries”

I don’t know many people who rely on publications like the one in question for valid scientific news. It is quite sad though, because the general public is going to pick up their local publications and read what they believe to be articles actually written by scientists (or they at least got their factual information from a scientist). When in reality, most of it is crap or it’s a generalized article borrowing from many other sources & rehashed into someone’s unsupported “scientific” opinion.

That being said, I dont’ know how many people would actually be interested in the stats used to determine the sexiest wiggle, valid or falsified.

olliemae said,

Ben, you seem to have ruffled a few feathers among your “flaky humanities” readers. Even if we haven’t studied science at uni, many of us do take the subject seriously. I myself studied chemistry for two years before switching to my flaky classics degree.

I of course agree that the so-called journalists who write this tripe are flaky, but in order to improve the problem we need to get away from looking down on those who take a nonprofessional interest in another subject (i.e. writers who dabble in science, doctors who dabble in writing, etc.). We should encourage crossover work, grab some scientists to write the science news, find out how philosophers could reform the pharmaceutical industry. We might just bring in some fresh new ideas.

Robert Carnegie said,

The problem with using personal in-jokes in e-mail to people who don’t know you and your work, is, is self-evident. I mean, unless you’re communicating these days by YouTube, they can’t see you making “quote fingers”. Your hands are away from the keyboard.

pigfrog said,

Surely the accusative plural of ‘homo’ wouldn’t be stored in Ben’s semantic memory in any case as it is the recall of a propositionally learnt grammatical pattern – semantic memory would only be activated by recalling the lexemic meaning ‘man or person’ which is not affected by case/number.

However, I am prepared to go along with Ben’s argument that it was episodic in this instance!! My recall of 3rd declension nouns (specifically ‘rex’ in my case)is similarly episodic!